Silver Wattle (13 page)

‘Hold on to your money,’ he told me. ‘You might need it. And we have all that we need here.’

It was a strange thing that Ranjana and Uncle Ota worked hard and had few material items and yet lived more abundantly than some of the richest families in Prague. They never went to balls or parties, yet their lives were filled with more good humour and fun than I had seen in any damasked and gold-leafed parlour.

One afternoon, Klara and I were collecting the washing from the line in the back garden when I sensed someone watching us. I turned to see a woman peering through the pencil pines that bordered our house and our neighbour’s. She was so pale that if I had not known better I would have thought her a ghost. The woman was perhaps three or four years older than Ranjana, but in her brown house dress and with bags under her eyes she looked worn out.

‘Hello,’ I said.

The woman started. Despite her appearance, her eyes were bright and alert. ‘Hello,’ she replied. Her mouth trembled as if she would like to say more, but she thought better of it and turned on her heel and scurried away.

‘How extraordinary,’ Klara said. ‘She’s like a little mouse.’

‘That’s Esther,’ Ranjana explained when she returned home. ‘The daughter of the woman we rent the house from. She’s terribly shy. I think it’s the strain of looking after her mother. The woman has been blind for ten years.’

‘Lonely souls need comfort,’ Mother always said. She had won Father’s admiration, and irritated Milosh, by visiting neighbours who were suffering misfortune. She could not help herself. She had been born with a generous heart. I decided that I did not just want to look like my mother, I wanted to emulate her. So the following afternoon, Klara and I decided to visit our reclusive neighbour. We packed a basket with jars of Ranjana’s lilly-pilly and kumquat jams and headed next door.

The house that Esther and her mother shared was twice the size of ours, with a second storey, but was much drearier. In the front garden a fountain had crumbled into mouldy ruins overrun by ivy, and the veranda was a mass of cobwebs with tree roots poking through the boards. But the back garden, from what Klara and I had managed to glimpse through the gaps in the paling fence, was an overgrown Eden of silver gum and bloodwood trees knotted with flannel flowers, lilies and lantana. We would have loved to explore it.

I knocked on the door. A butterfly with turquoise wings rimmed in black flitted over my wrist to the knocker then off again. The creature was a thing of beauty set against the shabbiness of the house. We heard feet shuffling down the hall. The door opened a crack and Esther peered at us.

‘We wanted to introduce ourselves to you,’ I told her. ‘I am Ota Rose’s niece, Adela, and this is my sister, Klara.’

If Esther heard me she did not acknowledge it. She stared at us without saying a word. Klara held up the basket of jams and Esther looked at it as if she did not know what it was. A mouse, Klara had called her. I half expected Esther to sniff the contents, twitch her nose, then run away.

‘We will leave the basket here,’ I said, pointing to a dusty table on the veranda. Esther’s shyness was crippling and I did not want to impose on her too long.

But to my surprise a smile came to her face. With her small face and large eyes she was a pretty woman, but the dowdy clothes and unkempt hair hid it. ‘You play the piano?’ she asked me.

‘Klara does,’ I replied.

‘It’s beautiful,’ Esther said. ‘It gives Mother a lot of pleasure.’

We had to take care that the sea air and the dramatic temperature changes of late winter did not put the piano out of tune but from that day on we opened the window a crack whenever Klara sat down to play piano. On my nineteenth birthday, we were celebrating with a chocolate cake in the back room when Klara looked out the window and noticed that a window in Esther’s house had opened a crack too. The following month, when the temperatures steadied, both windows opened to halfway. Then, in October, Esther opened her window all the way and took down the curtains. When the light was at a certain angle, we saw an elderly woman reclining in a chair with her back towards the window.

One day a note appeared in our letterbox:
Mother says that you are rushing the fugue. You should try to play it more evenly
.

Then the following day, another message arrived:
Mother says that if you want to achieve a singing sound, you must relax your arms more. Move your fingers as little as possible from the keys and follow every movement of them with a downward and upward motion of the arm
.

After that a note appeared that read:
Acquiring a good technique is as much a mental process as a physical one. Make sure you do not let your mind wander
. This was soon followed by:
Before you start your piece, sit in front of the piano and imagine how you will play it from start to finish. If this makes you feel impatient, you must keep doing this until you can sit before your piano and be relaxed. Never be in a rush to commence your piece without having settled your mind first. This is the reason you are playing the Schumann too fast
.

The tuition from Esther’s mother proved right. Whenever Klara applied the advice, the quality of the piece she was practising improved.

After a while, we could not contain our curiosity.

Esther,
I wrote at the bottom of one of the notes before returning it to the letterbox,
Klara and I should very much like to meet your mother. We would like to thank her for the help she has been giving Klara.

There was no reply with the following day’s note, but the morning after that, when I was leaving to go to the grocery shop, I found Esther hovering near the gate. She was wearing a wool skirt that rolled around the hemline and a brown sweater.

‘Mother says you can come at three tomorrow afternoon,’ she said. She trembled when she gave the invitation and seemed relieved when I said that we would be there. She turned to go and a blue butterfly, like the one we had seen near her door, appeared. It rested on her shoulder, unnoticed by her, before flying off again.

Ranjana was making chocolates and told us that we could take some for our visit to Esther and her mother. Klara and I watched Ranjana blend the chocolate, vanilla and milk and pour the mixture into heart-shaped moulds. I thought of Prague, where the house had smelt of roasting cocoa beans for days before Mother blended her chocolate. Uncle Ota arrived home and tried to taste a piece before it had set. Ranjana shooed him from the kitchen.

‘Thomas is better behaved than you!’ she said, and chased him down the hall with a saucepan, laughing.

Given the rundown appearance of the house, I expected the interior of our neighbours’ home to be as decrepit and to find Esther’s mother sitting amongst cobwebs and dust like Miss Havisham in Dickens’s
Great Expectations
. So when Esther opened the door for Klara and me and invited us in, I was surprised to find that the house was orderly although gloomy. We followed Esther down a corridor, past bedrooms with the curtains drawn but with enough light seeping in to catch glimpses of neatly made four-poster beds and carved mahogany wardrobes.

We arrived at a room at the back of the house, where Esther’s mother was sitting. She wore a black dress with leg-of-mutton sleeves and a high collar. When she heard our footsteps, she turned in our direction. Her eyes were cloudy. I had seen the condition in an old dog once. It was cataracts and there was nothing that could be done about them.

‘Mother, your guests are here,’ Esther said.

Her mother nodded. Her skin was wrinkled, with deep crevices running from the corners of her mouth to her chin. The lines gave her the comical appearance of a ventriloquist’s doll, but there was nothing humorous about the woman.

‘I am Mrs Bain,’ she said, without asking our names in turn. ‘Sit down.’ It was more an order than an invitation.

Besides the armchair in which Mrs Bain sat, there were four walnut chairs set in a circle around a faded rug. Klara and I sat ourselves in two of these while Esther placed the dish of chocolates we had brought on the table before disappearing down the hall. The room gave me a queer feeling. There was a cast-iron fireplace decorated with lion’s-head mouldings and the chairs we sat in had carved heads of nymphs on the crests and arms. The wallpaper was patterned in a peacock-feather design, which gave the effect of dozens of eyes staring down at us. The woman in the room was blind and yet I felt that we were being watched from every angle.

Esther returned with a tray of cups and a teapot. I turned to Mrs Bain. ‘I have to thank you,’ I said. ‘Your help has been invaluable to Klara’s progress.’

I restrained myself from asking questions but I was curious to know who Esther’s mother was. There was a burled walnut piano in the corner of the room, its lid closed and covered in a white cloth. The piano appeared to be in good condition but, from the porcelain figurines that had been arranged on the lid, seemed to have not been played for some time. There were no photographs in the room or other personal mementos to give us a clue to the identity of Mrs Bain and what made her an authority on music. The only thing I was sure of was that Esther and her mother had not always resided in Watsons Bay. The elaborate furniture was out of place in the wooden home and out of keeping with the area, which was mostly fishermen’s cottages and labourers’ huts.

Mrs Bain returned my gratitude with a tight-lipped smile. Esther placed some chocolates on a plate on her mother’s lap. Mrs Bain picked one up and smelled it, but not in the timid, mouse-like way her daughter explored things. She gave the impression of a wolf sniffing the air before commencing the hunt. She put the chocolate back on her plate without touching it. Who could refuse one of Ranjana’s delicious chocolates? I felt sorry for anyone who had lost a sense so precious as sight, but Mrs Bain’s behaviour made me wonder if she had been an insensitive person all her life.

‘Your sister has natural aptitude,’ Mrs Bain said to me. ‘But genius is a jealous god and demands sacrifice.’

The conversation continued in an awkward manner. I managed to elicit from Mrs Bain that she had studied music in London and Vienna and, although she had never performed in anything more public than a soiree herself, she had taught piano and many of her students had gone overseas to forge careers. I wanted to ask her what to do about Klara’s musical education and whether she thought the Conservatorium High School would be a suitable institution. I had assumed Esther’s mother might be interested to know that we were from Prague, the city that had produced great composers and inspired foreign ones. But Mrs Bain talked about herself—about how her life had been ruined by the loss of her sight, how her status in society had been reduced by her husband’s death and his family’s scrambling for the assets. She did not say outright that Esther had blighted her life, but she left us with the impression that she had been enjoying a ‘long youth’ until her daughter came along.

From the awkwardness with which Esther went about serving the tea, pushing the plates around the table and nearly spilling the sugar, I sensed that we were the first visitors to the house in years and a fresh audience for what Esther must have listened to every day. While Mrs Bain might not be as rich now as when she lived with her husband in Point Piper, she was not exactly in the poorhouse. Her home could have been a lovely place to live, despite her blindness. But Mrs Bain was determined to live miserably, and to make Esther do so along with her. The visit passed slowly, and we were relieved when it came time to leave.

‘Poor Esther,’ Klara said when we returned home. ‘What a joyless person she lives with. I am benefiting from Mrs Bain’s notes but I see now that she is not sending them out of generosity. She just wants to show off.’

After listening to our story, Uncle Ota agreed. ‘It’s Esther who enjoys Klara’s playing, I think. The poor thing is starved for beauty—and company. We need to entice her here more often.’

Klara continued to open the window when she practised and Mrs Bain continued to send notes. But we were in no hurry for a return visit to our landlady’s house, although I could not help thinking about Esther. I sensed she had potential for a bigger and better life. But was it her mother alone who had made her so frightened and drab?

It was the milkman, our educator on everything we needed to know about Australia from its politics to redback spiders, who gave us the answer. ‘Esther’s a nice girl,’ he told us. ‘She fell in love with a Protestant and her mother wouldn’t let them marry. He died in the war. When Esther received the news, Mrs Bain said it was just as well and Esther could forget all about the boy now. Poor love, I don’t think she ever got over that. She closed down and shut out the world.’

I felt for Esther. The sight of ex-soldiers wandering the streets, many missing a limb or an eye, still wearing their service badges on their shabby suits, was heartbreaking. The war had finished only a few years ago and yet they had already become invisible. The world had moved on. But they must have been painful reminders to Esther of her lost love. Perhaps that was the reason she rarely went out.

There was still no word from Aunt Josephine.

‘If something bad has happened, Doctor Holub would have told us,’ Uncle Ota assured me. ‘As they used to say in the war, “No news is good news.”’

Uncle Ota, however, received some information from the director of the Australian Museum about his job. And it was good news indeed. He beamed when he told us: ‘I’ve been promoted to a guide.’

I was glad for Uncle Ota, and sorry for him too. He was over-qualified for the job. He had a university diploma and had mastered several languages during his travels. He wanted to be a teacher but had been unable to obtain a university post because he was foreign. Still, the promotion meant that he would not be performing menial cleaning jobs any longer.

Uncle Ota proved to be a popular tour guide and enjoyed his work so much that Ranjana suggested we invite people to our house each Tuesday evening for a lecture-cum-soiree.

‘For a small fee, we can treat guests to a recital by Klara, canapes courtesy of me, and a lecture by Ota based on his experiences travelling the world,’ she said.